I marking myself safe on here. I left calmly as soon I heard about seriousness of incident. No casualties thankfully. For some reason when crowd trouble initially mentioned people asked if I had anything to do with it.

Seen some reasons in my time for games being abandoned but never one like this.

To fire a crossbow into a public area is really stupidity of the highest level.No distance from many of the recent terror attacks the perpetrator was not only putting other people at risk but also himself. Armed response units tend to fire first and ask questions later in the current climate.

On Monday I attended the Oval as did a friend of mine from Nottingham. Although they have a history of archers in that county I doubt it was him as he is a man of the cloth.

Sounds like Surrey did a good job of keeping everyone safe though Dan Norcross's assumption on BBC that it is not possible to hit a target with a crossbow from the distance it had to be fired from outside the ground is wrong. With the correct sight and no wind these modern crossbows can be lethal at about half a mile in the hands of a good shot.

Don't see why anyone is blaming Kev , he'd have missed the Oval and probably hit the Gas Holder.

Credit to Simmo, Compo and Ollie for ensuring that at least we needn't feel that we were fortuitously saved from defeat. From the snatches of commentary that I heard, it sounded as if Compo was batting in some discomfort, so a great effort by him.

Glad you are heading home Kev,others at the game have also text and said left ground and are heading home.
Let's hope the complete idiot gets caught.
Although obviously I wasn't there,it sounds like Surrey did a good job in making everyone safe...well done to them.

Hopefully it will be established what exactly happened to cause the match to be abandoned, whether that happens in days, weeks or months. I listened to most of the morning and evening session (I had a job assessment in the afternoon), although as I am not good at explaining things, I didn’t tell my mum about the incident until about half-an-hour after, as I didn’t want to worry her. It sounded like no-one was allowed to leave or enter the ground, or that they had to stay indoors, although I don’t know if that was entirely the case, as Lower Mound says that he was able to leave as soon as he realised at about 4:45pm that there was unlikely to be any further play.

Well done to Surrey, the Metropolitan Police and the other parties involved in their work today.

It has been pointed out that the arrow landed a couple of pitches away from where the match was being played and that the arrow happened to have MCC colours, so it would be sad if the incident was caused by someone with cricket awareness (the incident is sad whatever way it is looked at, although it would be a different kind of sad if the perpetrator(s) knew exactly what they were doing). Unfortunately, there have been plenty of occasions when someone with a decent understanding of cricket has used their knowledge to sabotage a ground, for example by throwing a chemical to an important area of the square or digging it up, such as when England played Australia at Headingley in 1975. Also, a recent article in the Guardian about thefts at clubs mentioned an incident in which someone cut 4m by 3m from a new artificial pitch, which the club’s secretary remarked as “too neat a job” to simply be vandalism.

At the start of the day, the height of my ambitions was that Middlesex would draw, preferably without giving our followers discomfort. It was therefore worrying when it was realised that Nick Compton couldn’t resume his innings, which was followed by four wickets falling before I went out, which ultimately resulted in six wickets falling in a 22.1 over period. I had a fear that I would come home to find that Surrey had began their run chase or were close to doing so, which meant I was relieved to see that Compo had been able to return and that John Simpson was also going well. It was also great that Ollie Rayner followed his first innings 38 by holding out for 52 balls in the second innings and contributed 30. Earlier in the day, Kevin Hand said that Rayner should bat at 8 and Toby Roland-Jones should bat at 9 due to Rayner having a better defence and TRJ having more licence to counter-attack at 9, and the evidence of this match suggests that would make sense despite calls for TRJ to bat higher.

The procession of wickets earlier today may not have began had Sam Robson not been given out when he and the commentators were convinced he hadn’t hit the ball, and when the bowler Sam Curran didn’t initially appeal.

If the match was in the balance when it had to be abandoned, then that wouldn’t have been particularly fair. However, Surrey seemed to be on their last throw of the dice when the incident happened, so a draw was a fair result.

At no point when I listened did the commentators speculate we were in trouble of suffering a points deduction for a slow over-rate, so I didn’t consider the possibility. Thankfully, it appears we haven’t been penalised, although the way the match finished leaves me fearful that it could happen once the officials get time to sort these things out. However, as much as I don't want us to lose points, I feel it would be incorrect to spare us a deduction solely due to the circumstances of the abandonment. I always find it a sad state of affairs when I have to look at the table after a match to determine whether we have incurred a deduction.

From a cricketing points of view, about the only negatives from how today’s three division one matches went were that we made heavy work of securing a draw and that Compo has an injury which may rule him out of our next match. However, with Nick Gubbins hoping to be fit, we could simply make a like-for-like change.

I'm still trying to get my head round the incident. Lesser of two evils it was a childest prank that got out of hand. I have seen the picture of arrows that represented MCC colours, I just hope there is nothing sinister is going on here.

I wasn't in touch much with the last day, having to attend a particularly raw funeral. If I had been I might have seen "crowd trouble" and thought that SWC had finally cracked. By the time I was able to look at anything it was front page news and too staggering to even contemplate thinking of the puns we use to come to terms with it.

Whilst it is worrying, any idiot with a crossbow could fire an arrow into a much more crowded place than The Oval playing surface. I suspect that's just what it was, an idiot, quite likely amazed at how far their new "toy" actually sent the arrow.

The travails of the top order really are quite worrying, though it seems there was decent help for the bowlers for a change. I notice Simmo looked very reluctant to leave the pitch. I suppose he would have been being 12 short of a century with five balls of a Borthwick over to come! Real match-saving innings. Good to see Ollie getting decent runs twice as well.

The Metropolitan Police are still appealing for anyone with footage of the incident, which they sound expectant that people will provide. Considering some organisations consider it to be an offence for a non-rights holder to film a sporting event (particularly if they post it online and/or use their footage to gain income), it makes it a turn of events for people to be encouraged to have filmed part of this match. I am sure I read somewhere that an ex-player posted their own footage of the Champions Trophy on Twitter, but was told off by an ICC official for doing this, and had to thus remove the footage. However, a Google search does not provide me with confirmation of this.

I have looked at the table on BBC, and it says Middlesex have been deducted two points, almost certainly for a slow over rate in this match. 2017 thus becomes the fourth season running in which we have lost points due to this.

We record all IP addresses on the Sportnetwork message boards which may be required by the authorities in case of defamatory or abusive comment.
We seek to monitor the Message Boards at regular intervals.
We do not associate Sportnetwork with any of the comments and do not take responsibility for any statements or opinions expressed on the Message Boards.
If you have any cause for concern over any material posted here please let us know as soon as possible by e-mailing
abuse@sportnetwork.net